Lika Korinteli and Dima Kaxiani, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, said that Dima’s brother had been picked up by the police and deported to Germany despite an arm injury.

The authorities said that when in Germany he could appeal the decision of the Icelandic Directorate of Immigration. “Why couldn’t he stay here and appeal?” they asked.

Iceland, along with 14 other countries in Europe, is a signer of the Schengen Treaty, an agreement on joint border controls and police collaboration. The European Union’s Dublin Regulation requires asylum seekers to submit their application in the first Schengen country they arrive in. If they request asylum in a third country, authorities there may send them back to the first Schengen country without examining their application. Because Iceland is usually not the first country a refugee arrives in, the system works well for the Icelandic rulers.

Some of the asylum seekers have been waiting up to 10 months for a decision of the Directorate of Immigration. Haydar Majed Mahdi said the worst part was having nothing to do. “We want to work. Ten months is too long to do nothing but talk to each other, eat, and sleep.” Mahdi left Iraq after his parents were killed in an explosion two years ago.

Riaz Ahmed Khan, from Afghanistan, told Sjónvarpid (the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service) that some of them wanted to protest in Reykjavík, the capital. “A one-way ticket is 850 kronur (US$13). Each week they give us 2,000 kronur. A round-trip ticket is almost 1,700 kronur. What would be left?”

Most asylum seekers stay at Fit Hostel in Reykjanesbær, a town close to the international airport and a 45-minute drive from Reykjavík. Twenty-three reportedly are now waiting for their applications to be examined. Thirty have so far sought asylum this year.

“This country should be marked a ‘no-go’ area on the map,” one asylum seeker said. The only time a person has been granted political asylum in Iceland was in 2000—leaving aside former chess champion Bobby Fischer, who was given full citizenship last March in a diplomatic move by Reykjavík.

The government has periodically chosen individuals from particular countries to grant refugee status and residence and work permits. From 1956 to 1991, 204 people entered Iceland in this way. For the seven-year period between 1996 and 2003, 216 were granted these permits—141 from the Krajina region in Yugoslavia, and 75 from Kosova.

In recent years some of those seeking asylum have been granted a residence permit on humanitarian grounds, but statistics show that number to be declining at the same time as the number of those seeking asylum has shot up. In 1998, 13 applicants were granted a residence permit out of 24, as opposed to 6 of 117 in 2002. In 2004, 76 applied, but so far none of these has been granted a residence permit on humanitarian grounds.  
 
 
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